And “Move” will let you move files or folders wholesale. When you swipe left on a file or folder, you’ll see two options pop up: “More” and “Move.” “More” gives you options like sharing, duplicating, and copying content to put it in other places within a project. Scrivener takes advantage of the mobile interface when you’re looking at the binder. And you can add a note and a synopsis for each file and specify the status, like “first draft” or “to do.” It’s possible to customize status options and labels. Scrivener lets you select just the right icon to use for each file and folder within the binder, and use colored labels to differentiate files and folders. It’s nice that you can rearrange the order of files in the binder for each project, and you can choose to make a file double as a folder that stores other files. When you open up the file from the Bookmarks menu, you’ll be taken right to the place where you left off. And you can designate the most important files by bookmarking them - just tap the bookmark at the bottom of the screen while you’re editing. You just hit the clock button to bring up a Recent Documents menu. While you’re working on one file, it’s very easy to switch to another. This is perfect when you have the realization that you need to start a new chapter because the existing file is just too long as is. If you want, you can “split” the text in any given file at a certain point, so what’s before your cursor stays in the current file, and what’s after your cursor gets dumped into a brand new file. (If that metric isn’t useful for you, you can tell Scrivener to display a character count instead.) I like the settings for the “find” function, including “find and replace all.” I like the word count at the top of the document. If you don’t like this option, you can turn it off.
I like the additional row of keys that you see above the virtual keyboard - a pair of quotation marks, a single quote mark, a comma, a period, a question mark, an exclamation mark, a colon, and a semicolon. Sure, I can get around with the virtual keyboard in this app, but I prefer to use it with my Apple Extended Keyboard II from 1990.
And, at least for now, there’s no native Android app.īut still, Scrivener on iOS is pretty great. There isn’t much you can do with the 3D Touch capability that arrived with iOS 9. While you can opt to sync files to Dropbox when you tap the appropriate button in the app or close the app, it doesn’t automatically sync files as they change, unlike Word or Google Docs. You can sync to Dropbox, but you can’t sync to other cloud services– like Box, Google Drive, or OneDrive. But the app works just fine on the iPhone, too. On the iPad, the app takes advantage of Split View - you can shuffle individual files in a project on a corkboard, just like on the desktop version of Scrivener, and you can even look at two documents at the same time if you’d like. But now that it’s available as a native mobile app, Scrivener will likely enjoy a new wave of adoption from those who fondly remember its advantages on desktop and those who want to work on longer documents while they’re on the go. There are certainly other word processing apps that work well on iOS devices, including Word, Google Docs, Quip, and Ulysses, which won an Apple Design Award at this year’s WWDC developer conference. But the app developers have provided a feature that you would expect for a mobile-friendly word processing app: the ability to store the app in a cloud service, specifically Dropbox. Of course, I can store the data for this file on the iPhone 6s that the app is running on. But today, that changed, because Literature & Latte has put together a beta of an iOS app, and I’m writing this article in it right now.